Herein lie buried many things which if read with patience may show the
strange meaning of being black here at the dawning of the Twentieth
Century. This meaning is not without interest to you, Gentle Reader;
for the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color
line. I pray you, then, receive my little book in all charity,
studying my words with me, forgiving mistake and foible for sake of the
faith and passion that is in me, and seeking the grain of truth hidden
there.

I have sought here to sketch, in vague, uncertain outline, the
spiritual world in which ten thousand thousand Americans live and
strive. First, in two chapters I have tried to show what Emancipation
meant to them, and what was its aftermath. In a third chapter I have
pointed out the slow rise of personal leadership, and criticized
candidly the leader who bears the chief burden of his race to-day.
Then, in two other chapters I have sketched in swift outline the two
worlds within and without the Veil, and thus have come to the central
problem of training men for life. Venturing now into deeper detail, I
have in two chapters studied the struggles of the massed millions of
the black peasantry, and in another have sought to make clear the
present relations of the sons of master and man. Leaving, then, the
white world, I have stepped within the Veil, raising it that you may
view faintly its deeper recesses,—the meaning of its religion, the
passion of its human sorrow, and the struggle of its greater souls.
All this I have ended with a tale twice told but seldom written, and a
chapter of song.

Some of these thoughts of mine have seen the light before in other
guise. For kindly consenting to their republication here, in altered
and extended form, I must thank the publishers of the Atlantic Monthly,
The World's Work, the Dial, The New World, and the Annals of the
American Academy of Political and Social Science. Before each chapter,
as now printed, stands a bar of the Sorrow Songs,—some echo of
haunting melody from the only American music which welled up from black
souls in the dark past. And, finally, need I add that I who speak here
am bone of the bone and flesh of the flesh of them that live within the
Veil?

W.E.B Du B.
ATLANTA, GA., FEB. 1, 1903.

Of Our Spiritual Strivings

O water, voice of my heart, crying in the sand,
All night long crying with a mournful cry,
As I lie and listen, and cannot understand
The voice of my heart in my side or the voice of the sea,
O water, crying for rest, is it I, is it I?
All night long the water is crying to me.

Unresting water, there shall never be rest
Till the last moon droop and the last tide fail,
And the fire of the end begin to burn in the west;
And the heart shall be weary and wonder and cry like the sea,
All life long crying without avail,
As the water all night long is crying to me.

ARTHUR SYMONS.

Between me and the other world there is ever an unasked question:
unasked by some through feelings of delicacy; by others through the
difficulty of rightly framing it. All, nevertheless, flutter round it.
They approach me in a half-hesitant sort of way, eye me curiously or
compassionately, and then, instead of saying directly, How does it feel
to be a problem? they say, I know an excellent colored man in my town;
or, I fought at Mechanicsville; or, Do not these Southern outrages make
your blood boil? At these I smile, or am interested, or reduce the
boiling to a simmer, as the occasion may require. To the real
question, How does it feel to be a problem? I answer seldom a word.

And yet, being a problem is a strange experience,—peculiar even for
one who has never been anything else, save perhaps in babyhood and in
Europe. It is in the early days of rollicking boyhood that the
revelation first bursts upon one, all in a day, as it were. I remember
well when the shadow swept across me. I was a little thing, away up in
the hills of New England, where the dark Housatonic winds between
Hoosac and Taghkanic to the sea. In a wee wooden schoolhouse,
something put it into the boys' and girls' heads to buy gorgeous
visiting-cards—ten cents a package—and exchange. The exchange was
merry, till one girl, a tall newcomer, refused my card,—refused it
peremptorily, with a glance. Then it dawned upon me with a certain
suddenness that I was different from the others; or like, mayhap, in
heart and life and longing, but shut out from their world by a vast
veil. I had thereafter no desire to tear down that veil, to creep
through; I held all beyond it in common contempt, and lived above it in
a region of blue sky and great wandering shadows. That sky was bluest
when I could beat my mates at examination-time, or beat them at a
foot-race, or even beat their stringy heads. Alas, with the years all
this fine contempt began to fade; for the words I longed for, and all
their dazzling opportunities, were theirs, not mine. But they should
not keep these prizes, I said; some, all, I would wrest from them.
Just how I would do it I could never decide: by reading law, by healing
the sick, by telling the wonderful tales that swam in my head,—some
way. With other black boys the strife was not so fiercely sunny: their
youth shrunk into tasteless sycophancy, or into silent hatred of the
pale world about them and mocking distrust of everything white; or
wasted itself in a bitter cry, Why did God make me an outcast and a
stranger in mine own house? The shades of the prison-house closed
round about us all: walls strait and stubborn to the whitest, but
relentlessly narrow, tall, and unscalable to sons of night who must
plod darkly on in resignation, or beat unavailing palms against the
stone, or steadily, half hopelessly, watch the streak of blue above.

After the Egyptian and Indian, the Greek and Roman, the Teuton and
Mongolian, the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and
gifted with second-sight in this American world,—a world which yields
him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through
the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this
double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one's self
through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by the tape of a
world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his
twoness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two
unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose
dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.

The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife,—this
longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into
a better and truer self. In this merging he wishes neither of the
older selves to be lost. He would not Africanize America, for America
has too much to teach the world and Africa. He would not bleach his
Negro soul in a flood of white Americanism, for he knows that Negro
blood has a message for the world. He simply wishes to make it
possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American, without being
cursed and spit upon by his fellows, without having the doors of
Opportunity closed roughly in his face.

This, then, is the end of his striving: to be a co-worker in the
kingdom of culture, to escape both death and isolation, to husband and
use his best powers and his latent genius. These powers of body and
mind have in the past been strangely wasted, dispersed, or forgotten.
The shadow of a mighty Negro past flits through the tale of Ethiopia
the Shadowy and of Egypt the Sphinx. Through history, the powers of
single black men flash here and there like falling stars, and die
sometimes before the world has rightly gauged their brightness. Here
in America, in the few days since Emancipation, the black man's turning
hither and thither in hesitant and doubtful striving has often made his
very strength to lose effectiveness, to seem like absence of power,
like weakness. And yet it is not weakness,—it is the contradiction of
double aims. The double-aimed struggle of the black artisan—on the
one hand to escape white contempt for a nation of mere hewers of wood
and drawers of water, and on the other hand to plough and nail and dig
for a poverty-stricken horde—could only result in making him a poor
craftsman, for he had but half a heart in either cause. By the poverty
and ignorance of his people, the Negro minister or doctor was tempted
toward quackery and demagogy; and by the criticism of the other world,
toward ideals that made him ashamed of his lowly tasks. The would-be
black savant was confronted by the paradox that the knowledge his
people needed was a twice-told tale to his white neighbors, while the
knowledge which would teach the white world was Greek to his own flesh
and blood. The innate love of harmony and beauty that set the ruder
souls of his people a-dancing and a-singing raised but confusion and
doubt in the soul of the black artist; for the beauty revealed to him
was the soul-beauty of a race which his larger audience despised, and
he could not articulate the message of another people. This waste of
double aims, this seeking to satisfy two unreconciled ideals, has
wrought sad havoc with the courage and faith and deeds of ten thousand
thousand people,—has sent them often wooing false gods and invoking
false means of salvation, and at times has even seemed about to make
them ashamed of themselves.

Away back in the days of bondage they thought to see in one divine
event the end of all doubt and disappointment; few men ever worshipped
Freedom with half such unquestioning faith as did the American Negro
for two centuries. To him, so far as he thought and dreamed, slavery
was indeed the sum of all villainies, the cause of all sorrow, the root
of all prejudice; Emancipation was the key to a promised land of
sweeter beauty than ever stretched before the eyes of wearied
Israelites. In song and exhortation swelled one refrain—Liberty; in
his tears and curses the God he implored had Freedom in his right hand.
At last it came,—suddenly, fearfully, like a dream. With one wild
carnival of blood and passion came the message in his own plaintive
cadences:

Years have passed away since then,—ten, twenty, forty; forty years of
national life, forty years of renewal and development, and yet the
swarthy spectre sits in its accustomed seat at the Nation's feast. In
vain do we cry to this our vastest social problem:

Take any shape but that, and my firm nerves
Shall never tremble!

The Nation has not yet found peace from its sins; the freedman has not
yet found in freedom his promised land. Whatever of good may have come
in these years of change, the shadow of a deep disappointment rests
upon the Negro people,—a disappointment all the more bitter because
the unattained ideal was unbounded save by the simple ignorance of a
lowly people.

The first decade was merely a prolongation of the vain search for
freedom, the boon that seemed ever barely to elude their grasp,—like a
tantalizing will-o'-the-wisp, maddening and misleading the headless
host. The holocaust of war, the terrors of the Ku-Klux Klan, the lies
of carpet-baggers, the disorganization of industry, and the
contradictory advice of friends and foes, left the bewildered serf with
no new watchword beyond the old cry for freedom. As the time flew,
however, he began to grasp a new idea. The ideal of liberty demanded
for its attainment powerful means, and these the Fifteenth Amendment
gave him. The ballot, which before he had looked upon as a visible
sign of freedom, he now regarded as the chief means of gaining and
perfecting the liberty with which war had partially endowed him. And
why not? Had not votes made war and emancipated millions? Had not
votes enfranchised the freedmen? Was anything impossible to a power
that had done all this? A million black men started with renewed zeal
to vote themselves into the kingdom. So the decade flew away, the
revolution of 1876 came, and left the half-free serf weary, wondering,
but still inspired. Slowly but steadily, in the following years, a new
vision began gradually to replace the dream of political power,—a
powerful movement, the rise of another ideal to guide the unguided,
another pillar of fire by night after a clouded day. It was the ideal
of "book-learning"; the curiosity, born of compulsory ignorance, to
know and test the power of the cabalistic letters of the white man, the
longing to know. Here at last seemed to have been discovered the
mountain path to Canaan; longer than the highway of Emancipation and
law, steep and rugged, but straight, leading to heights high enough to
overlook life.

Up the new path the advance guard toiled, slowly, heavily, doggedly;
only those who have watched and guided the faltering feet, the misty
minds, the dull understandings, of the dark pupils of these schools
know how faithfully, how piteously, this people strove to learn. It
was weary work. The cold statistician wrote down the inches of
progress here and there, noted also where here and there a foot had
slipped or some one had fallen. To the tired climbers, the horizon was
ever dark, the mists were often cold, the Canaan was always dim and far
away. If, however, the vistas disclosed as yet no goal, no
resting-place, little but flattery and criticism, the journey at least
gave leisure for reflection and self-examination; it changed the child
of Emancipation to the youth with dawning self-consciousness,
self-realization, self-respect. In those sombre forests of his
striving his own soul rose before him, and he saw himself,—darkly as
through a veil; and yet he saw in himself some faint revelation of his
power, of his mission. He began to have a dim feeling that, to attain
his place in the world, he must be himself, and not another. For the
first time he sought to analyze the burden he bore upon his back, that
dead-weight of social degradation partially masked behind a half-named
Negro problem. He felt his poverty; without a cent, without a home,
without land, tools, or savings, he had entered into competition with
rich, landed, skilled neighbors. To be a poor man is hard, but to be a
poor race in a land of dollars is the very bottom of hardships. He
felt the weight of his ignorance,—not simply of letters, but of life,
of business, of the humanities; the accumulated sloth and shirking and
awkwardness of decades and centuries shackled his hands and feet. Nor
was his burden all poverty and ignorance. The red stain of bastardy,
which two centuries of systematic legal defilement of Negro women had
stamped upon his race, meant not only the loss of ancient African
chastity, but also the hereditary weight of a mass of corruption from
white adulterers, threatening almost the obliteration of the Negro home.

A people thus handicapped ought not to be asked to race with the world,
but rather allowed to give all its time and thought to its own social
problems. But alas! while sociologists gleefully count his bastards
and his prostitutes, the very soul of the toiling, sweating black man
is darkened by the shadow of a vast despair. Men call the shadow
prejudice, and learnedly explain it as the natural defence of culture
against barbarism, learning against ignorance, purity against crime,
the "higher" against the "lower" races. To which the Negro cries Amen!
and swears that to so much of this strange prejudice as is founded on
just homage to civilization, culture, righteousness, and progress, he
humbly bows and meekly does obeisance. But before that nameless
prejudice that leaps beyond all this he stands helpless, dismayed, and
well-nigh speechless; before that personal disrespect and mockery, the
ridicule and systematic humiliation, the distortion of fact and wanton
license of fancy, the cynical ignoring of the better and the boisterous
welcoming of the worse, the all-pervading desire to inculcate disdain
for everything black, from Toussaint to the devil,—before this there
rises a sickening despair that would disarm and discourage any nation
save that black host to whom "discouragement" is an unwritten word.

But the facing of so vast a prejudice could not but bring the
inevitable self-questioning, self-disparagement, and lowering of ideals
which ever accompany repression and breed in an atmosphere of contempt
and hate. Whisperings and portents came home upon the four winds: Lo!
we are diseased and dying, cried the dark hosts; we cannot write, our
voting is vain; what need of education, since we must always cook and
serve? And the Nation echoed and enforced this self-criticism, saying:
Be content to be servants, and nothing more; what need of higher
culture for half-men? Away with the black man's ballot, by force or
fraud,—and behold the suicide of a race! Nevertheless, out of the
evil came something of good,—the more careful adjustment of education
to real life, the clearer perception of the Negroes' social
responsibilities, and the sobering realization of the meaning of
progress.

So dawned the time of Sturm und Drang: storm and stress to-day rocks
our little boat on the mad waters of the world-sea; there is within and
without the sound of conflict, the burning of body and rending of soul;
inspiration strives with doubt, and faith with vain questionings. The
bright ideals of the past,—physical freedom, political power, the
training of brains and the training of hands,—all these in turn have
waxed and waned, until even the last grows dim and overcast. Are they
all wrong,—all false? No, not that, but each alone was over-simple
and incomplete,—the dreams of a credulous race-childhood, or the fond
imaginings of the other world which does not know and does not want to
know our power. To be really true, all these ideals must be melted and
welded into one. The training of the schools we need to-day more than
ever,—the training of deft hands, quick eyes and ears, and above all
the broader, deeper, higher culture of gifted minds and pure hearts.
The power of the ballot we need in sheer self-defence,—else what shall
save us from a second slavery? Freedom, too, the long-sought, we still
seek,—the freedom of life and limb, the freedom to work and think, the
freedom to love and aspire. Work, culture, liberty,—all these we
need, not singly but together, not successively but together, each
growing and aiding each, and all striving toward that vaster ideal that
swims before the Negro people, the ideal of human brotherhood, gained
through the unifying ideal of Race; the ideal of fostering and
developing the traits and talents of the Negro, not in opposition to or
contempt for other races, but rather in large conformity to the greater
ideals of the American Republic, in order that some day on American
soil two world-races may give each to each those characteristics both
so sadly lack. We the darker ones come even now not altogether
empty-handed: there are to-day no truer exponents of the pure human
spirit of the Declaration of Independence than the American Negroes;
there is no true American music but the wild sweet melodies of the
Negro slave; the American fairy tales and folklore are Indian and
African; and, all in all, we black men seem the sole oasis of simple
faith and reverence in a dusty desert of dollars and smartness. Will
America be poorer if she replace her brutal dyspeptic blundering with
light-hearted but determined Negro humility? or her coarse and cruel
wit with loving jovial good-humor? or her vulgar music with the soul of
the Sorrow Songs?

Merely a concrete test of the underlying principles of the great
republic is the Negro Problem, and the spiritual striving of the
freedmen's sons is the travail of souls whose burden is almost beyond
the measure of their strength, but who bear it in the name of an
historic race, in the name of this the land of their fathers' fathers,
and in the name of human opportunity.

And now what I have briefly sketched in large outline let me on coming
pages tell again in many ways, with loving emphasis and deeper detail,
that men may listen to the striving in the souls of black folk.

Of the Dawn of Freedom

Careless seems the great Avenger;
History's lessons but record
One death-grapple in the darkness
Twixt old systems and the Word;
Truth forever on the scaffold,
Wrong forever on the throne;
Yet that scaffold sways the future,
And behind the dim unknown
Standeth God within the shadow
Keeping watch above His own.

LOWELL.

The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the
color-line,—the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men in
Asia and Africa, in America and the islands of the sea. It was a phase
of this problem that caused the Civil War; and however much they who
marched South and North in 1861 may have fixed on the technical points,
of union and local autonomy as a shibboleth, all nevertheless knew, as
we know, that the question of Negro slavery was the real cause of the
conflict. Curious it was, too, how this deeper question ever forced
itself to the surface despite effort and disclaimer. No sooner had
Northern armies touched Southern soil than this old question, newly
guised, sprang from the earth,—What shall be done with Negroes?
Peremptory military commands this way and that, could not answer the
query; the Emancipation Proclamation seemed but to broaden and
intensify the difficulties; and the War Amendments made the Negro
problems of to-day.

It is the aim of this essay to study the period of history from 1861 to
1872 so far as it relates to the American Negro. In effect, this tale
of the dawn of Freedom is an account of that government of men called
the Freedmen's Bureau,—one of the most singular and interesting of the
attempts made by a great nation to grapple with vast problems of race
and social condition.

The war has naught to do with slaves, cried Congress, the President,
and the Nation; and yet no sooner had the armies, East and West,
penetrated Virginia and Tennessee than fugitive slaves appeared within
their lines. They came at night, when the flickering camp-fires shone
like vast unsteady stars along the black horizon: old men and thin,
with gray and tufted hair; women with frightened eyes, dragging
whimpering hungry children; men and girls, stalwart and gaunt,—a horde
of starving vagabonds, homeless, helpless, and pitiable, in their dark
distress. Two methods of treating these newcomers seemed equally
logical to opposite sorts of minds. Ben Butler, in Virginia, quickly
declared slave property contraband of war, and put the fugitives to
work; while Fremont, in Missouri, declared the slaves free under
martial law. Butler's action was approved, but Fremont's was hastily
countermanded, and his successor, Halleck, saw things differently.
"Hereafter," he commanded, "no slaves should be allowed to come into
your lines at all; if any come without your knowledge, when owners call
for them deliver them." Such a policy was difficult to enforce; some
of the black refugees declared themselves freemen, others showed that
their masters had deserted them, and still others were captured with
forts and plantations. Evidently, too, slaves were a source of
strength to the Confederacy, and were being used as laborers and
producers. "They constitute a military resource," wrote Secretary
Cameron, late in 1861; "and being such, that they should not be turned
over to the enemy is too plain to discuss." So gradually the tone of
the army chiefs changed; Congress forbade the rendition of fugitives,
and Butler's "contrabands" were welcomed as military laborers. This
complicated rather than solved the problem, for now the scattering
fugitives became a steady stream, which flowed faster as the armies
marched.

Then the long-headed man with care-chiselled face who sat in the White
House saw the inevitable, and emancipated the slaves of rebels on New
Year's, 1863. A month later Congress called earnestly for the Negro
soldiers whom the act of July, 1862, had half grudgingly allowed to
enlist. Thus the barriers were levelled and the deed was done. The
stream of fugitives swelled to a flood, and anxious army officers kept
inquiring: "What must be done with slaves, arriving almost daily? Are
we to find food and shelter for women and children?"

It was a Pierce of Boston who pointed out the way, and thus became in a
sense the founder of the Freedmen's Bureau. He was a firm friend of
Secretary Chase; and when, in 1861, the care of slaves and abandoned
lands devolved upon the Treasury officials, Pierce was specially
detailed from the ranks to study the conditions. First, he cared for
the refugees at Fortress Monroe; and then, after Sherman had captured
Hilton Head, Pierce was sent there to found his Port Royal experiment
of making free workingmen out of slaves. Before his experiment was
barely started, however, the problem of the fugitives had assumed such
proportions that it was taken from the hands of the over-burdened
Treasury Department and given to the army officials. Already centres
of massed freedmen were forming at Fortress Monroe, Washington, New
Orleans, Vicksburg and Corinth, Columbus, Ky., and Cairo, Ill., as well
as at Port Royal. Army chaplains found here new and fruitful fields;
"superintendents of contrabands" multiplied, and some attempt at
systematic work was made by enlisting the able-bodied men and giving
work to the others.

Then came the Freedmen's Aid societies, born of the touching appeals
from Pierce and from these other centres of distress. There was the
American Missionary Association, sprung from the Amistad, and now
full-grown for work; the various church organizations, the National
Freedmen's Relief Association, the American Freedmen's Union, the
Western Freedmen's Aid Commission,—in all fifty or more active
organizations, which sent clothes, money, school-books, and teachers
southward. All they did was needed, for the destitution of the
freedmen was often reported as "too appalling for belief," and the
situation was daily growing worse rather than better.

And daily, too, it seemed more plain that this was no ordinary matter
of temporary relief, but a national crisis; for here loomed a labor
problem of vast dimensions. Masses of Negroes stood idle, or, if they
worked spasmodically, were never sure of pay; and if perchance they
received pay, squandered the new thing thoughtlessly. In these and
other ways were camp-life and the new liberty demoralizing the
freedmen. The broader economic organization thus clearly demanded
sprang up here and there as accident and local conditions determined.
Here it was that Pierce's Port Royal plan of leased plantations and
guided workmen pointed out the rough way. In Washington the military
governor, at the urgent appeal of the superintendent, opened
confiscated estates to the cultivation of the fugitives, and there in
the shadow of the dome gathered black farm villages. General Dix gave
over estates to the freedmen of Fortress Monroe, and so on, South and
West. The government and benevolent societies furnished the means of
cultivation, and the Negro turned again slowly to work. The systems of
control, thus started, rapidly grew, here and there, into strange
little governments, like that of General Banks in Louisiana, with its
ninety thousand black subjects, its fifty thousand guided laborers, and
its annual budget of one hundred thousand dollars and more. It made
out four thousand pay-rolls a year, registered all freedmen, inquired
into grievances and redressed them, laid and collected taxes, and
established a system of public schools. So, too, Colonel Eaton, the
superintendent of Tennessee and Arkansas, ruled over one hundred
thousand freedmen, leased and cultivated seven thousand acres of cotton
land, and fed ten thousand paupers a year. In South Carolina was
General Saxton, with his deep interest in black folk. He succeeded
Pierce and the Treasury officials, and sold forfeited estates, leased
abandoned plantations, encouraged schools, and received from Sherman,
after that terribly picturesque march to the sea, thousands of the
wretched camp followers.

Three characteristic things one might have seen in Sherman's raid
through Georgia, which threw the new situation in shadowy relief: the
Conqueror, the Conquered, and the Negro. Some see all significance in
the grim front of the destroyer, and some in the bitter sufferers of
the Lost Cause. But to me neither soldier nor fugitive speaks with so
deep a meaning as that dark human cloud that clung like remorse on the
rear of those swift columns, swelling at times to half their size,
almost engulfing and choking them. In vain were they ordered back, in
vain were bridges hewn from beneath their feet; on they trudged and
writhed and surged, until they rolled into Savannah, a starved and
naked horde of tens of thousands. There too came the characteristic
military remedy: "The islands from Charleston south, the abandoned
rice-fields along the rivers for thirty miles back from the sea, and
the country bordering the St. John's River, Florida, are reserved and
set apart for the settlement of Negroes now made free by act of war."
So read the celebrated "Field-order Number Fifteen."

All these experiments, orders, and systems were bound to attract and
perplex the government and the nation. Directly after the Emancipation
Proclamation, Representative Eliot had introduced a bill creating a
Bureau of Emancipation; but it was never reported. The following June
a committee of inquiry, appointed by the Secretary of War, reported in
favor of a temporary bureau for the "improvement, protection, and
employment of refugee freedmen," on much the same lines as were
afterwards followed. Petitions came in to President Lincoln from
distinguished citizens and organizations, strongly urging a
comprehensive and unified plan of dealing with the freedmen, under a
bureau which should be "charged with the study of plans and execution
of measures for easily guiding, and in every way judiciously and
humanely aiding, the passage of our emancipated and yet to be
emancipated blacks from the old condition of forced labor to their new
state of voluntary industry."

Some half-hearted steps were taken to accomplish this, in part, by
putting the whole matter again in charge of the special Treasury
agents. Laws of 1863 and 1864 directed them to take charge of and
lease abandoned lands for periods not exceeding twelve months, and to
"provide in such leases, or otherwise, for the employment and general
welfare" of the freedmen. Most of the army officers greeted this as a
welcome relief from perplexing "Negro affairs," and Secretary
Fessenden, July 29, 1864, issued an excellent system of regulations,
which were afterward closely followed by General Howard. Under
Treasury agents, large quantities of land were leased in the
Mississippi Valley, and many Negroes were employed; but in August,
1864, the new regulations were suspended for reasons of "public
policy," and the army was again in control.

Meanwhile Congress had turned its attention to the subject; and in
March the House passed a bill by a majority of two establishing a
Bureau for Freedmen in the War Department. Charles Sumner, who had
charge of the bill in the Senate, argued that freedmen and abandoned
lands ought to be under the same department, and reported a substitute
for the House bill attaching the Bureau to the Treasury Department.
This bill passed, but too late for action by the House. The debates
wandered over the whole policy of the administration and the general
question of slavery, without touching very closely the specific merits
of the measure in hand. Then the national election took place; and the
administration, with a vote of renewed confidence from the country,
addressed itself to the matter more seriously. A conference between
the two branches of Congress agreed upon a carefully drawn measure
which contained the chief provisions of Sumner's bill, but made the
proposed organization a department independent of both the War and the
Treasury officials. The bill was conservative, giving the new
department "general superintendence of all freedmen." Its purpose was
to "establish regulations" for them, protect them, lease them lands,
adjust their wages, and appear in civil and military courts as their
"next friend." There were many limitations attached to the powers thus
granted, and the organization was made permanent. Nevertheless, the
Senate defeated the bill, and a new conference committee was appointed.
This committee reported a new bill, February 28, which was whirled
through just as the session closed, and became the act of 1865
establishing in the War Department a "Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and
Abandoned Lands."

This last compromise was a hasty bit of legislation, vague and
uncertain in outline. A Bureau was created, "to continue during the
present War of Rebellion, and for one year thereafter," to which was
given "the supervision and management of all abandoned lands and the
control of all subjects relating to refugees and freedmen," under "such
rules and regulations as may be presented by the head of the Bureau and
approved by the President." A Commissioner, appointed by the President
and Senate, was to control the Bureau, with an office force not
exceeding ten clerks. The President might also appoint assistant
commissioners in the seceded States, and to all these offices military
officials might be detailed at regular pay. The Secretary of War could
issue rations, clothing, and fuel to the destitute, and all abandoned
property was placed in the hands of the Bureau for eventual lease and
sale to ex-slaves in forty-acre parcels.

Thus did the United States government definitely assume charge of the
emancipated Negro as the ward of the nation. It was a tremendous
undertaking. Here at a stroke of the pen was erected a government of
millions of men,—and not ordinary men either, but black men
emasculated by a peculiarly complete system of slavery, centuries old;
and now, suddenly, violently, they come into a new birthright, at a
time of war and passion, in the midst of the stricken and embittered
population of their former masters. Any man might well have hesitated
to assume charge of such a work, with vast responsibilities, indefinite
powers, and limited resources. Probably no one but a soldier would
have answered such a call promptly; and, indeed, no one but a soldier
could be called, for Congress had appropriated no money for salaries
and expenses.

Less than a month after the weary Emancipator passed to his rest, his
successor assigned Major-Gen. Oliver O. Howard to duty as Commissioner
of the new Bureau. He was a Maine man, then only thirty-five years of
age. He had marched with Sherman to the sea, had fought well at
Gettysburg, and but the year before had been assigned to the command of
the Department of Tennessee. An honest man, with too much faith in
human nature, little aptitude for business and intricate detail, he had
had large opportunity of becoming acquainted at first hand with much of
the work before him. And of that work it has been truly said that "no
approximately correct history of civilization can ever be written which
does not throw out in bold relief, as one of the great landmarks of
political and social progress, the organization and administration of
the Freedmen's Bureau."

On May 12, 1865, Howard was appointed; and he assumed the duties of his
office promptly on the 15th, and began examining the field of work. A
curious mess he looked upon: little despotisms, communistic
experiments, slavery, peonage, business speculations, organized
charity, unorganized almsgiving,—all reeling on under the guise of
helping the freedmen, and all enshrined in the smoke and blood of the
war and the cursing and silence of angry men. On May 19 the new
government—for a government it really was—issued its constitution;
commissioners were to be appointed in each of the seceded states, who
were to take charge of "all subjects relating to refugees and
freedmen," and all relief and rations were to be given by their consent
alone. The Bureau invited continued cooperation with benevolent
societies, and declared: "It will be the object of all commissioners to
introduce practicable systems of compensated labor," and to establish
schools. Forthwith nine assistant commissioners were appointed. They
were to hasten to their fields of work; seek gradually to close relief
establishments, and make the destitute self-supporting; act as courts
of law where there were no courts, or where Negroes were not recognized
in them as free; establish the institution of marriage among ex-slaves,
and keep records; see that freedmen were free to choose their
employers, and help in making fair contracts for them; and finally, the
circular said: "Simple good faith, for which we hope on all hands for
those concerned in the passing away of slavery, will especially relieve
the assistant commissioners in the discharge of their duties toward the
freedmen, as well as promote the general welfare."

No sooner was the work thus started, and the general system and local
organization in some measure begun, than two grave difficulties
appeared which changed largely the theory and outcome of Bureau work.
First, there were the abandoned lands of the South. It had long been
the more or less definitely expressed theory of the North that all the
chief problems of Emancipation might be settled by establishing the
slaves on the forfeited lands of their masters,—a sort of poetic
justice, said some. But this poetry done into solemn prose meant
either wholesale confiscation of private property in the South, or vast
appropriations. Now Congress had not appropriated a cent, and no
sooner did the proclamations of general amnesty appear than the eight
hundred thousand acres of abandoned lands in the hands of the
Freedmen's Bureau melted quickly away. The second difficulty lay in
perfecting the local organization of the Bureau throughout the wide
field of work. Making a new machine and sending out officials of duly
ascertained fitness for a great work of social reform is no child's
task; but this task was even harder, for a new central organization had
to be fitted on a heterogeneous and confused but already existing
system of relief and control of ex-slaves; and the agents available for
this work must be sought for in an army still busy with war
operations,—men in the very nature of the case ill fitted for delicate
social work,—or among the questionable camp followers of an invading
host. Thus, after a year's work, vigorously as it was pushed, the
problem looked even more difficult to grasp and solve than at the
beginning. Nevertheless, three things that year's work did, well worth
the doing: it relieved a vast amount of physical suffering; it
transported seven thousand fugitives from congested centres back to the
farm; and, best of all, it inaugurated the crusade of the New England
schoolma'am.

The annals of this Ninth Crusade are yet to be written,—the tale of a
mission that seemed to our age far more quixotic than the quest of St.
Louis seemed to his. Behind the mists of ruin and rapine waved the
calico dresses of women who dared, and after the hoarse mouthings of
the field guns rang the rhythm of the alphabet. Rich and poor they
were, serious and curious. Bereaved now of a father, now of a brother,
now of more than these, they came seeking a life work in planting New
England schoolhouses among the white and black of the South. They did
their work well. In that first year they taught one hundred thousand
souls, and more.

Evidently, Congress must soon legislate again on the hastily organized
Bureau, which had so quickly grown into wide significance and vast
possibilities. An institution such as that was well-nigh as difficult
to end as to begin. Early in 1866 Congress took up the matter, when
Senator Trumbull, of Illinois, introduced a bill to extend the Bureau
and enlarge its powers. This measure received, at the hands of
Congress, far more thorough discussion and attention than its
predecessor. The war cloud had thinned enough to allow a clearer
conception of the work of Emancipation. The champions of the bill
argued that the strengthening of the Freedmen's Bureau was still a
military necessity; that it was needed for the proper carrying out of
the Thirteenth Amendment, and was a work of sheer justice to the
ex-slave, at a trifling cost to the government. The opponents of the
measure declared that the war was over, and the necessity for war
measures past; that the Bureau, by reason of its extraordinary powers,
was clearly unconstitutional in time of peace, and was destined to
irritate the South and pauperize the freedmen, at a final cost of
possibly hundreds of millions. These two arguments were unanswered,
and indeed unanswerable: the one that the extraordinary powers of the
Bureau threatened the civil rights of all citizens; and the other that
the government must have power to do what manifestly must be done, and
that present abandonment of the freedmen meant their practical
reenslavement. The bill which finally passed enlarged and made
permanent the Freedmen's Bureau. It was promptly vetoed by President
Johnson as "unconstitutional," "unnecessary," and "extrajudicial," and
failed of passage over the veto. Meantime, however, the breach between
Congress and the President began to broaden, and a modified form of the
lost bill was finally passed over the President's second veto, July 16.

The act of 1866 gave the Freedmen's Bureau its final form,—the form by
which it will be known to posterity and judged of men. It extended the
existence of the Bureau to July, 1868; it authorized additional
assistant commissioners, the retention of army officers mustered out of
regular service, the sale of certain forfeited lands to freedmen on
nominal terms, the sale of Confederate public property for Negro
schools, and a wider field of judicial interpretation and cognizance.
The government of the unreconstructed South was thus put very largely
in the hands of the Freedmen's Bureau, especially as in many cases the
departmental military commander was now made also assistant
commissioner. It was thus that the Freedmen's Bureau became a
full-fledged government of men. It made laws, executed them and
interpreted them; it laid and collected taxes, defined and punished
crime, maintained and used military force, and dictated such measures
as it thought necessary and proper for the accomplishment of its varied
ends. Naturally, all these powers were not exercised continuously nor
to their fullest extent; and yet, as General Howard has said, "scarcely
any subject that has to be legislated upon in civil society failed, at
one time or another, to demand the action of this singular Bureau."

To understand and criticise intelligently so vast a work, one must not
forget an instant the drift of things in the later sixties. Lee had
surrendered, Lincoln was dead, and Johnson and Congress were at
loggerheads; the Thirteenth Amendment was adopted, the Fourteenth
pending, and the Fifteenth declared in force in 1870. Guerrilla
raiding, the ever-present flickering after-flame of war, was spending
its forces against the Negroes, and all the Southern land was awakening
as from some wild dream to poverty and social revolution. In a time of
perfect calm, amid willing neighbors and streaming wealth, the social
uplifting of four million slaves to an assured and self-sustaining
place in the body politic and economic would have been a herculean
task; but when to the inherent difficulties of so delicate and nice a
social operation were added the spite and hate of conflict, the hell of
war; when suspicion and cruelty were rife, and gaunt Hunger wept beside
Bereavement,—in such a case, the work of any instrument of social
regeneration was in large part foredoomed to failure. The very name of
the Bureau stood for a thing in the South which for two centuries and
better men had refused even to argue,—that life amid free Negroes was
simply unthinkable, the maddest of experiments.

The agents that the Bureau could command varied all the way from
unselfish philanthropists to narrow-minded busybodies and thieves; and
even though it be true that the average was far better than the worst,
it was the occasional fly that helped spoil the ointment.

Then amid all crouched the freed slave, bewildered between friend and
foe. He had emerged from slavery,—not the worst slavery in the world,
not a slavery that made all life unbearable, rather a slavery that had
here and there something of kindliness, fidelity, and happiness,—but
withal slavery, which, so far as human aspiration and desert were
concerned, classed the black man and the ox together. And the Negro
knew full well that, whatever their deeper convictions may have been,
Southern men had fought with desperate energy to perpetuate this
slavery under which the black masses, with half-articulate thought, had
writhed and shivered. They welcomed freedom with a cry. They shrank
from the master who still strove for their chains; they fled to the
friends that had freed them, even though those friends stood ready to
use them as a club for driving the recalcitrant South back into
loyalty. So the cleft between the white and black South grew. Idle to
say it never should have been; it was as inevitable as its results were
pitiable. Curiously incongruous elements were left arrayed against
each other,—the North, the government, the carpet-bagger, and the
slave, here; and there, all the South that was white, whether gentleman
or vagabond, honest man or rascal, lawless murderer or martyr to duty.

Thus it is doubly difficult to write of this period calmly, so intense
was the feeling, so mighty the human passions that swayed and blinded
men. Amid it all, two figures ever stand to typify that day to coming
ages,—the one, a gray-haired gentleman, whose fathers had quit
themselves like men, whose sons lay in nameless graves; who bowed to
the evil of slavery because its abolition threatened untold ill to all;
who stood at last, in the evening of life, a blighted, ruined form,
with hate in his eyes;—and the other, a form hovering dark and
mother-like, her awful face black with the mists of centuries, had
aforetime quailed at that white master's command, had bent in love over
the cradles of his sons and daughters, and closed in death the sunken
eyes of his wife,—aye, too, at his behest had laid herself low to his
lust, and borne a tawny man-child to the world, only to see her dark
boy's limbs scattered to the winds by midnight marauders riding after
"damned Niggers." These were the saddest sights of that woful day; and
no man clasped the hands of these two passing figures of the
present-past; but, hating, they went to their long home, and, hating,
their children's children live today.

Here, then, was the field of work for the Freedmen's Bureau; and since,
with some hesitation, it was continued by the act of 1868 until 1869,
let us look upon four years of its work as a whole. There were, in
1868, nine hundred Bureau officials scattered from Washington to Texas,
ruling, directly and indirectly, many millions of men. The deeds of
these rulers fall mainly under seven heads: the relief of physical
suffering, the overseeing of the beginnings of free labor, the buying
and selling of land, the establishment of schools, the paying of
bounties, the administration of justice, and the financiering of all
these activities.

Up to June, 1869, over half a million patients had been treated by
Bureau physicians and surgeons, and sixty hospitals and asylums had
been in operation. In fifty months twenty-one million free rations
were distributed at a cost of over four million dollars. Next came the
difficult question of labor. First, thirty thousand black men were
transported from the refuges and relief stations back to the farms,
back to the critical trial of a new way of working. Plain instructions
went out from Washington: the laborers must be free to choose their
employers, no fixed rate of wages was prescribed, and there was to be
no peonage or forced labor. So far, so good; but where local agents
differed toto caelo in capacity and character, where the personnel was
continually changing, the outcome was necessarily varied. The largest
element of success lay in the fact that the majority of the freedmen
were willing, even eager, to work. So labor contracts were
written,—fifty thousand in a single State,—laborers advised, wages
guaranteed, and employers supplied. In truth, the organization became
a vast labor bureau,—not perfect, indeed, notably defective here and
there, but on the whole successful beyond the dreams of thoughtful men.
The two great obstacles which confronted the officials were the tyrant
and the idler,—the slaveholder who was determined to perpetuate
slavery under another name; and, the freedman who regarded freedom as
perpetual rest,—the Devil and the Deep Sea.

In the work of establishing the Negroes as peasant proprietors, the
Bureau was from the first handicapped and at last absolutely checked.
Something was done, and larger things were planned; abandoned lands
were leased so long as they remained in the hands of the Bureau, and a
total revenue of nearly half a million dollars derived from black
tenants. Some other lands to which the nation had gained title were
sold on easy terms, and public lands were opened for settlement to the
very few freedmen who had tools and capital. But the vision of "forty
acres and a mule"—the righteous and reasonable ambition to become a
landholder, which the nation had all but categorically promised the
freedmen—was destined in most cases to bitter disappointment. And
those men of marvellous hindsight who are today seeking to preach the
Negro back to the present peonage of the soil know well, or ought to
know, that the opportunity of binding the Negro peasant willingly to
the soil was lost on that day when the Commissioner of the Freedmen's
Bureau had to go to South Carolina and tell the weeping freedmen, after
their years of toil, that their land was not theirs, that there was a
mistake—somewhere. If by 1874 the Georgia Negro alone owned three
hundred and fifty thousand acres of land, it was by grace of his thrift
rather than by bounty of the government.

The greatest success of the Freedmen's Bureau lay in the planting of
the free school among Negroes, and the idea of free elementary
education among all classes in the South. It not only called the
school-mistresses through the benevolent agencies and built them
schoolhouses, but it helped discover and support such apostles of human
culture as Edmund Ware, Samuel Armstrong, and Erastus Cravath. The
opposition to Negro education in the South was at first bitter, and
showed itself in ashes, insult, and blood; for the South believed an
educated Negro to be a dangerous Negro. And the South was not wholly
wrong; for education among all kinds of men always has had, and always
will have, an element of danger and revolution, of dissatisfaction and
discontent. Nevertheless, men strive to know. Perhaps some inkling of
this paradox, even in the unquiet days of the Bureau, helped the
bayonets allay an opposition to human training which still to-day lies
smouldering in the South, but not flaming. Fisk, Atlanta, Howard, and
Hampton were founded in these days, and six million dollars were
expended for educational work, seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars
of which the freedmen themselves gave of their poverty.

Such contributions, together with the buying of land and various other
enterprises, showed that the ex-slave was handling some free capital
already. The chief initial source of this was labor in the army, and
his pay and bounty as a soldier. Payments to Negro soldiers were at
first complicated by the ignorance of the recipients, and the fact that
the quotas of colored regiments from Northern States were largely
filled by recruits from the South, unknown to their fellow soldiers.
Consequently, payments were accompanied by such frauds that Congress,
by joint resolution in 1867, put the whole matter in the hands of the
Freedmen's Bureau. In two years six million dollars was thus
distributed to five thousand claimants, and in the end the sum exceeded
eight million dollars. Even in this system fraud was frequent; but
still the work put needed capital in the hands of practical paupers,
and some, at least, was well spent.

The most perplexing and least successful part of the Bureau's work lay
in the exercise of its judicial functions. The regular Bureau court
consisted of one representative of the employer, one of the Negro, and
one of the Bureau. If the Bureau could have maintained a perfectly
judicial attitude, this arrangement would have been ideal, and must in
time have gained confidence; but the nature of its other activities and
the character of its personnel prejudiced the Bureau in favor of the
black litigants, and led without doubt to much injustice and annoyance.
On the other hand, to leave the Negro in the hands of Southern courts
was impossible. In a distracted land where slavery had hardly fallen,
to keep the strong from wanton abuse of the weak, and the weak from
gloating insolently over the half-shorn strength of the strong, was a
thankless, hopeless task. The former masters of the land were
peremptorily ordered about, seized, and imprisoned, and punished over
and again, with scant courtesy from army officers. The former slaves
were intimidated, beaten, raped, and butchered by angry and revengeful
men. Bureau courts tended to become centres simply for punishing
whites, while the regular civil courts tended to become solely
institutions for perpetuating the slavery of blacks. Almost every law
and method ingenuity could devise was employed by the legislatures to
reduce the Negroes to serfdom,—to make them the slaves of the State,
if not of individual owners; while the Bureau officials too often were
found striving to put the "bottom rail on top," and gave the freedmen a
power and independence which they could not yet use. It is all well
enough for us of another generation to wax wise with advice to those
who bore the burden in the heat of the day. It is full easy now to see
that the man who lost home, fortune, and family at a stroke, and saw
his land ruled by "mules and niggers," was really benefited by the
passing of slavery. It is not difficult now to say to the young
freedman, cheated and cuffed about who has seen his father's head
beaten to a jelly and his own mother namelessly assaulted, that the
meek shall inherit the earth. Above all, nothing is more convenient
than to heap on the Freedmen's Bureau all the evils of that evil day,
and damn it utterly for every mistake and blunder that was made.

All this is easy, but it is neither sensible nor just. Someone had
blundered, but that was long before Oliver Howard was born; there was
criminal aggression and heedless neglect, but without some system of
control there would have been far more than there was. Had that
control been from within, the Negro would have been re-enslaved, to all
intents and purposes. Coming as the control did from without, perfect
men and methods would have bettered all things; and even with imperfect
agents and questionable methods, the work accomplished was not
undeserving of commendation.

uch was the dawn of Freedom; such was the work of the
Freedmen's Bureau, which, summed up in brief, may be epitomized thus:
for some fifteen million dollars, beside the sums spent before 1865,
and the dole of benevolent societies, this Bureau set going a system of
free labor, established a beginning of peasant proprietorship, secured
the recognition of black freedmen before courts of law, and founded the
free common school in the South. On the other hand, it failed to begin
the establishment of good-will between ex-masters and freedmen, to
guard its work wholly from paternalistic methods which discouraged
self-reliance, and to carry out to any considerable extent its implied
promises to furnish the freedmen with land. Its successes were the
result of hard work, supplemented by the aid of philanthropists and the
eager striving of black men. Its failures were the result of bad local
agents, the inherent difficulties of the work, and national neglect.

Such an institution, from its wide powers, great responsibilities,
large control of moneys, and generally conspicuous position, was
naturally open to repeated and bitter attack. It sustained a searching
Congressional investigation at the instance of Fernando Wood in 1870.
Its archives and few remaining functions were with blunt discourtesy
transferred from Howard's control, in his absence, to the supervision
of Secretary of War Belknap in 1872, on the Secretary's recommendation.
Finally, in consequence of grave intimations of wrong-doing made by the
Secretary and his subordinates, General Howard was court-martialed in
1874. In both of these trials the Commissioner of the Freedmen's
Bureau was officially exonerated from any wilful misdoing, and his work
commended. Nevertheless, many unpleasant things were brought to
light,—the methods of transacting the business of the Bureau were
faulty; several cases of defalcation were proved, and other frauds
strongly suspected; there were some business transactions which savored
of dangerous speculation, if not dishonesty; and around it all lay the
smirch of the Freedmen's Bank.

Morally and practically, the Freedmen's Bank was part of the Freedmen's
Bureau, although it had no legal connection with it. With the prestige
of the government back of it, and a directing board of unusual
respectability and national reputation, this banking institution had
made a remarkable start in the development of that thrift among black
folk which slavery had kept them from knowing. Then in one sad day
came the crash,—all the hard-earned dollars of the freedmen
disappeared; but that was the least of the loss,—all the faith in
saving went too, and much of the faith in men; and that was a loss that
a Nation which to-day sneers at Negro shiftlessness has never yet made
good. Not even ten additional years of slavery could have done so much
to throttle the thrift of the freedmen as the mismanagement and
bankruptcy of the series of savings banks chartered by the Nation for
their especial aid. Where all the blame should rest, it is hard to
say; whether the Bureau and the Bank died chiefly by reason of the
blows of its selfish friends or the dark machinations of its foes,
perhaps even time will never reveal, for here lies unwritten history.

Of the foes without the Bureau, the bitterest were those who attacked
not so much its conduct or policy under the law as the necessity for
any such institution at all. Such attacks came primarily from the
Border States and the South; and they were summed up by Senator Davis,
of Kentucky, when he moved to entitle the act of 1866 a bill "to
promote strife and conflict between the white and black races … by
a grant of unconstitutional power." The argument gathered tremendous
strength South and North; but its very strength was its weakness. For,
argued the plain common-sense of the nation, if it is unconstitutional,
unpractical, and futile for the nation to stand guardian over its
helpless wards, then there is left but one alternative,—to make those
wards their own guardians by arming them with the ballot. Moreover,
the path of the practical politician pointed the same way; for, argued
this opportunist, if we cannot peacefully reconstruct the South with
white votes, we certainly can with black votes. So justice and force
joined hands.

The alternative thus offered the nation was not between full and
restricted Negro suffrage; else every sensible man, black and white,
would easily have chosen the latter. It was rather a choice between
suffrage and slavery, after endless blood and gold had flowed to sweep
human bondage away. Not a single Southern legislature stood ready to
admit a Negro, under any conditions, to the polls; not a single
Southern legislature believed free Negro labor was possible without a
system of restrictions that took all its freedom away; there was
scarcely a white man in the South who did not honestly regard
Emancipation as a crime, and its practical nullification as a duty. In
such a situation, the granting of the ballot to the black man was a
necessity, the very least a guilty nation could grant a wronged race,
and the only method of compelling the South to accept the results of
the war. Thus Negro suffrage ended a civil war by beginning a race
feud. And some felt gratitude toward the race thus sacrificed in its
swaddling clothes on the altar of national integrity; and some felt and
feel only indifference and contempt.

Had political exigencies been less pressing, the opposition to
government guardianship of Negroes less bitter, and the attachment to
the slave system less strong, the social seer can well imagine a far
better policy,—a permanent Freedmen's Bureau, with a national system
of Negro schools; a carefully supervised employment and labor office; a
system of impartial protection before the regular courts; and such
institutions for social betterment as savings-banks, land and building
associations, and social settlements. All this vast expenditure of
money and brains might have formed a great school of prospective
citizenship, and solved in a way we have not yet solved the most
perplexing and persistent of the Negro problems.

That such an institution was unthinkable in 1870 was due in part to
certain acts of the Freedmen's Bureau itself. It came to regard its
work as merely temporary, and Negro suffrage as a final answer to all
present perplexities. The political ambition of many of its agents and
proteges led it far afield into questionable activities, until the
South, nursing its own deep prejudices, came easily to ignore all the
good deeds of the Bureau and hate its very name with perfect hatred.
So the Freedmen's Bureau died, and its child was the Fifteenth
Amendment.

The passing of a great human institution before its work is done, like
the untimely passing of a single soul, but leaves a legacy of striving
for other men. The legacy of the Freedmen's Bureau is the heavy
heritage of this generation. To-day, when new and vaster problems are
destined to strain every fibre of the national mind and soul, would it
not be well to count this legacy honestly and carefully? For this much
all men know: despite compromise, war, and struggle, the Negro is not
free. In the backwoods of the Gulf States, for miles and miles, he may
not leave the plantation of his birth; in well-nigh the whole rural
South the black farmers are peons, bound by law and custom to an
economic slavery, from which the only escape is death or the
penitentiary. In the most cultured sections and cities of the South
the Negroes are a segregated servile caste, with restricted rights and
privileges. Before the courts, both in law and custom, they stand on a
different and peculiar basis. Taxation without representation is the
rule of their political life. And the result of all this is, and in
nature must have been, lawlessness and crime. That is the large legacy
of the Freedmen's Bureau, the work it did not do because it could not.

I have seen a land right merry with the sun, where children sing, and
rolling hills lie like passioned women wanton with harvest. And there
in the King's Highways sat and sits a figure veiled and bowed, by which
the traveller's footsteps hasten as they go. On the tainted air broods
fear. Three centuries' thought has been the raising and unveiling of
that bowed human heart, and now behold a century new for the duty and
the deed. The problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the
color-line.